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This dissertation investigates how filmmakers use sound to foster the viewer's embodied engagement with fictional characters. Much has been captured on the role of the film image and its affective properties in our engagement with character in academic literature. However, far less has been reported on the role of sound, especially its close relationship with the image in our pre-reflective and embodied engagement with film. This study will tackle this gap in film studies with close reference to films directed by Lynne Ramsay and Darius Marder. These directors place sound design at the centre of the films I have chosen for this study and is used in varying ways to subjectively narrate characters who are psychologically complex due to trauma experiences. To portray character complexity, Ramsay and Marder will often challenge conventional filmmaking methods and narrative structures. Subsequently, on the surface, the internal states of these characters may appear difficult to access but by attending to sound and the affective feeling this may generate, we can begin to comprehend a character's feelings. By way of close film analysis and relevant theory, I will examine how these directors and their sound designers - Paul Davies and Nicolas Becker - utilise the multisensory capacity of sound to engage the viewer in a character's internal state. Theories of subjective narration in film studies such as Edward Branigan (1984) and Murray Smith (1995) examine how communication of character subjectivity does not necessarily adhere to a specific film technique such as point of view. This study examines how Ramsay and Marder draw on the aural equivalent, point of audition to subjectively narrate their protagonist's perceptual experience of trauma through sound. Both Ramsay and Marder draw on diegetic sound effects and ambience rather than the more commonly used dialogue or music soundtrack to subjectively narrate their character's perceptual experiences. This makes their work intriguing but also challenging in the sense that these sound elements simultaneously lure the viewer into a character's psychological state but can also make our access to him or her a challenge. Drawing on composer and film sound theorist Michel Chion's seminal writings on audio-visuality in cinema, I will also discuss how point of audition and other key sound techniques such as acousmatic sound, acoustic close-ups, audio-bridging, and the effects of added value in the sound-image relationship - how the sonic can enhance the visuals and vice versa - help the viewer to embody a character's experience in film. A core finding of this thesis is that Ramsay and Marder demonstrate an acute awareness of for how sound design can portray the perceptual experience of a character's interiority but also for how in the context of the image the viewer can obtain feelings with, or empathy with a character. The films that I have selected for this thesis, therefore, are arguably intended to be experiential for the viewer, where we are encouraged to observe our own perceptual experience through the subjective narration of characters. Consequently, the question of how our cinematic experience connects with our everyday aural perception is significant to this study. Such an investigation paves the way to a bigger, significant area of inquiry: how audio-visual aesthetics are well-matched to tackle important questions of human perception and meaning - specifically hearing - and why sound is particularly effective in the viewer's embodiment of film character. This thesis considers hearing as part of a larger sensory system, where it interconnects with other senses and as a result, concerns the multisensory potential of sound in our pre-reflective experience of cinema. Given the focus of my study and with the aim to illuminate the salience of sound in our sensory experience of film, I draw from a variety of disciplines; - cognitive studies, philosophy (phenomenology), psychology and neuroscience. Consequently, my thesis is grounded in an embodied cognition approach to cinema - a sub-discipline of cognitive film studies, where phenomenological experience and bodily feeling intersects with the study of the mind.

This thesis examines the impact of traumatic war experience on gender identity, body integrity and welfare of German soldiers enlisted in the First World War (1914-1918) through a rigorous analysis of the sketches of the German Expressionist artists Erich Heckel (18831970) and Max Beckmann (1888-1950). The artists actively engaged with men affected by physical and psychological trauma during their service as medical orderlies in military hospitals and medical stations on Eastern and Western Fronts, and they created hundreds of intimate sketches exploring how these men articulated their pain and exhaustion arising from the lasting conflict. This thesis seeks to develop a critical framework for a rigorous analysis of the traumatised male body within the context of Expressionist art practice and early twentieth century medical discourse. It explores comparatively how the artists' sketches reflect a radical shift in the way the male body had been perceived and represented within the medical, social and cultural contexts prior to and during the First World War. The thesis makes use of interdisciplinary perspectives including art history, literature, sociology of the body and sexuality and medical humanities, all of which are relevant to a cogent understanding of war trauma and post-traumatic subjectivity and their impact on cultural images of masculinity in the German context of 1914-1918.

This study utilises a qualitative, arts-based research approach to explore the experiences of sexual abuse survivors as adult learners, visual artists and research participants. Building on the work of critical feminist adult educators who incorporate the arts to illuminate, challenge, empower and 'give voice', I provide an authentic representation of the multiple realities of women participating in non-formal adult art education and arts-based research. The study asks how a researcher can become methodologically equipped to conduct an arts-based study with vulnerable adults; what such an arts-based approach can offer a qualitative researcher and their participants; what the barriers and enablers to engagement are for vulnerable adults as learners, artists and research participants; and considers the impacts of engagement on the perceived recovery of survivors of sexual abuse. An empowerment-orientated, creative research methodology, underpinned by feminist values, provides a framework for this study. These insights are informed by social constructivism and critical theory, which highlight the role of social learning and peer influences when engaging and enabling hard-to-reach participants. The research identifies the challenges met when presenting as an artist-researcher and community-based teacher, attempting to sustain the engagement of adults who have experienced trauma. The study considers the physical, psychological and emotional barriers and enablers to participation for those who had been 'wounded' through their formative schooling and abuse suffered in childhood and adolescence. The importance of the practitioner maintaining reflexivity, flexibility, resilience and humour when delivering adult art education and arts-based research with vulnerable adults is shown to be essential. In addition, a support network to help cope with the emotional demands and unexpected, surprising and sometimes disorientating behaviours of vulnerable adult learners is recognised to be a critical component to delivery.

Surrealism, in the past decade, and increasingly in the last three years, has received heightened recognition, resurgence, and reevaluations of its international origins, geographical confluences and continued influence on our contemporary world. This Practice as Research thesis, consisting of both a scholarly study and a documentary on International Surrealism, stands as a critical interrogation around what Surrealism is, and generates primary research archiving the historical prominence of surrealism and examining the philosophical tenets offered by what arguably remains one of the most important avant-garde movements to reflect on this epoch. The numerous filmed interviews within the documentary declare an original record and portrait of the surrealist movement by words of those most closely associated to it. The corresponding thesis outlines the historical genealogy of the Surrealism outside of the presumed center and maps a more complicated and nuanced depiction of "what is" Surrealism. Questions of the relevance of Surrealism are revisited through more undervalued aspects of the movement's engagement in radical politics, revolution and struggle, and various responses of the movement, whether these be in the form of provocations, pamphleteering or invocations of solidarity and activism. In addition to examining the movement's overarching historical and political lessons, the question of the relationship of cinema and surrealism is reviewed, arguing that cinema might have had a larger role in the conception the movement beyond the engagements noted by the French theorist André Breton. This documentary film and ongoing archive project on Surrealism offers a constellation of filmed interviews made with various major interlocutors engaged and focal to the movement. These artists, theoreticians, scholars, curators, collectors, family members and friends recount their memories, stories, and thoughts on this movement doubling as testimonies and new research within the field of Surrealism acting as the main emphasis within this Creative Practice doctorate. These memory maps as embedded in the documentary film tease out the constitution of what is a surrealist document, and lead to multiple and revealing meditations that point to how Surrealism can respond to the growing challenges of the contemporary world.

Copy and appropriation of archival or/and found materials have long been an integral part of practices of collage, remix, and sample. Those methods are still a puzzling source of anxiety caused by copyright law. The aim of this research is to recognise that the artistic practice of copy and appropriation of visual, literary, and musical works protected by copyright requires urgent attention, evaluation, and adjustment to safeguard the contemporary, digital, and post-digital landscape in which artists live and thrive. This research is divided into two areas respectively concerned with two questions. The first question, "To what extent the use of copy and appropriation can be considered as a (moral or legal) right of an artist?" evaluated in Chapter One focuses on the meaning of authorship and its legal, moral, and philosophical implications. The second question: "How can relationships between past and present be represented and interrogated through a creative process that is informed by past methodologies and theories and determined by the possibilities offered in a post-digital age?" delineated in Chapter Two investigates the concept of artistic freedom to copy and appropriate. The practical part includes recordings of audiovisual compositions, documentation of which is available online. The collection includes the title work L'Apparition, the culmination of this theoretical and practical research. Compositional methodology is described in Chapter Three, and examples of work leading to the premiere of L'Apparition are presented in Chapter Four. This thesis proposes a remodelling of outdated perceptions of authorship and the inconsistent rule of copyright law. It also recommends a plan of action for artists and academics to pave a new way to collaborative and creative approaches based on the ethos of Open Source and Open Access materials. Finally, this research calls for the protection of artistic freedoms expressed in the form of a manifesto; its aim is to start a dialogue leading to reforms of copyright law in accordance with the reality of contemporary art.

This thesis addresses for the first time the impact of religious experience on the art of one of the nineteenth century's major French painters Édouard Manet (1832-1883). Catholicism places considerable emphasis on mortality and the veneration of saints, which the young Manet encountered head-on in the guise of a wax catacomb saint at his first school. Viewing such realistic and gruesome Christian imagery at close quarters on numerous occasions led to a profound awareness of his own mortality. Most scholars thus far have glossed over the importance of religion in the lives of avant-garde artists but, growing up as a member of the haute bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Paris, Manet was steeped in Catholicism. His society, his immediate family and his wide circle of friends and associates, most importantly Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), reinforced this Catholic outlook. Manet and Baudelaire shared the view that while life could be wonderful it could also be horrific. Close analysis of Manet's work shows that, far from being a secular artist, religious iconography plays a significant part in his oeuvre. He was deeply affected by regular exposure to a wax recumbent relic; by discovering the hanged body of his assistant in his studio; and by thoughts of the Passion of Christ. Christ on the Cross was a symbol of suffering in general and specifically of Manet's own torment as a struggling artist.

This study makes a contribution to knowledge through art practice by producing - for the first time - a meta-analysis of children's scribble typologies and an examination of the correlations between those typologies and simple pictorial structures produced by adults in the context of the rectangle. This research is predicated on the primacy of art practice as a means of research enquiry, both in its role as a materials-based and visual means of finding things out and by using practice as a comparative method across fields and disciplines. The wider significance of this study is its contribution to the development of methodologies of Fine Art practice through research and through emphasising the underdeveloped links between artists' image making, established cognitive and semiotic research into pictorial typologies and the graphic structures found in children's drawings. Application of lines and marks to a rectangular surface is a typical method of pictorial construction. Picture making occurs early in human development when infants begin to scribble, usually on rectangular sheets of paper. Studies of the early developmental stages of children's drawings have identified basic kinds of scribble pattern that evolve into more well-defined graphic forms. A meta-analysis of these typologies had never been put together before this research was undertaken. Nor had a comparison been made between typologies of scribble pattern and the pictorial structures occurring in the simplest visual communication designs produced by adults. Such a comparative study had never been used to generate a body of new artwork as research. The findings indicate that there is a finite typology of 41 Primary Line Formations that are commonly found across studies of children's spontaneous gestural mark-making. This was compared with the simplest adult designed pictorial structures, namely heraldic partitions and alphanumeric displays. As practice-based research, this PhD demonstrates that, in the context of the rectangle, the phenomena under study are related in terms of: 1. Configural morphology and how this is perceived; 2. Modes of representation and types of abstraction; 3. Modularity.

This thesis examines the ways in which the conception of colour in ancient Greek society differed from our modern understanding, and how a deeper investigation of the theoretical structure of ancient cognition of colour can affect and enhance our interaction with the art and literature of ancient Greece. Previous scholarship rarely focuses on polychromy as its primary study, though discrepancies and subtleties in the handling of colour terminology in literature, or the complex nature of colour used on surviving examples of material culture have been noted. This study places the intrinsic relationship ancient Greek society had with colour at its forefront, and constructs a framework through which we might understand the different connections and associations that they built. In scope, within the bounds of surviving material, this thesis aims to focus on evidence from both the art and text of the Archaic and Classical periods, and upon the societies of mainland Greece, predominantly that of Athens. Source material has been used beyond these delineations as necessary to provide both a richer understanding of the main focus and relevant comparanda. Colour conception is explored in three ways. The first investigates the relationship between colours and the physical commodity used to produce them. This detaches our modern understanding of colour as contiguous and infinitely varied, and investigates colours that are tethered to their source material. In contrast, the second section explores terms which are not attached to any colourant, nor, in fact, any hue. This offers a theoretical explanation for why this structure of designating colours chromatically, intrinsic to modern conception, was not compulsory, necessary, nor often used in the Greek lexicon. Finally, the third approach takes this further, to dig into the fundamental conception of how colours and the world around them were constructed, and the ways in which that understanding affected the ancient Greek approach to the theory of colour. At its conclusion, this thesis argues that not just an appreciation of the existence of colour, but an understanding of the structure of the cognition of ancient polychromy can enhance our understanding of this visual language, a means of communication through a complex web of associations and connotations built up by shared cultural memory and graphic tradition.

This thesis examines the value of film and television adaptations of Dickens' novels; Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Bleak House and Great Expectations. Adaptations are bound to the multiple landscape, where they emerge from social, economic, commercial, and filmic contexts. Adaptations are not just bound to the original novel, they have the ability to undermine, parody, quote, and reframe it, to add new meanings relevant to its new audiences. Each adaptation interacts with its original novel differently, whilst using its own individual artistic license to engage their audiences. They also simultaneously engage in an intertextual conversation with other adaptations and films within their genres, adding layers of new meanings and interpretations. Collectively, they create an adaptive legacy which revitalise their original novels through new registers. Using textual analysis this thesis explores a range of film and television series adaptations of Dickens' work, and considers the deeper meanings that they construct in relation to thematic concerns of national identity, ethnicity, and gender. Additionally, the popular appeal of adaptations for new audiences is considered in light of film and cultural theory to determine the unique and often complex work that they engage in. This thesis explores the ways that adaptations have the potential to be situated in line with the auteur's individual style, whilst simultaneously respecting the essence of the novel from which they take inspiration. I suggest that the way in which adaptations interrelate with their own specific modes of production, and have the potential to converse with topical issues and the zeitgeist of the time, reveals the complex nature of film and television adaptations. This thesis asserts that adaptations must be situated within their own filmic, social, and economic context to appreciate the multiplicity of their response.

This practice-based research examines the development of the visual culture of British emergency politics between 1997-2017. It cites the first naming and emergence of the British government emergency response committee COBR (Cabinet Office Briefing Room) in 2000 as the beginning of a new condition in the visual culture of emergency politics. This study pinpoints the combination of camera phone images and social media in 2005, with the implementation of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 as a pivotal moment in who can now claim, and counter-claim, the legitimacy of civil emergency events. This study will show how emergency images have now become a set of standardised visual conventions and modes of habitual participation, normalising the condition of a continual state of emergency. This inquiry identifies a new category of images, namely the emergency image and the emergency response image. I argue that the emergency image and emergency response image have not only altered the public perception of emergency events and the State's response to them, but have opened up a new space for political contestation where the claiming of emergency events is now distributed between the State and the public. This investigation uses a practice-based research methodology to publicly reassemble the COBR Committee by actively collating, curating and documenting its previously siloed visual elements and fragments, and its emergency events between 1997-2017. Four original practice-based research outputs include: Emergency State: The COBR Committee between 1997-2017 held in July 2021, the web archive (www.COBR-Commitee.uk), a formal entry of a dataset of all publicly held COBR meetings between 1997-2017 to the UK Data Archive (dataset ref number: 855344) and an intervention in which images of a restaged COBR meeting are placed within the economy of images.

This thesis analyses the portrayals and representations of gender and sexuality since the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) in Japanese graphic arts. Changes in gender recognition since the 17th century have impacted on the way that gender and sexuality is portrayed visually, with innovations in artistic technologies forging new aesthetic representations and portrayals. Focusing on popular graphic arts, this study explores the idealised portrayals and representations of femininity, masculinity and cross-gender performances in ukiyo-e and manga. These popular graphic arts were and are part of a mass-producible popular culture that depicts counter cultures not located in the normative imagery or lives of the audience, but which illustrate ideals, that is perfection, and, in some cases, fantasy. The research utilises a cross-disciplinary approach regarding the scholarship consulted to enable a variety of contexts relating to femininity, masculinity and cross-gender acts to be explored. As the work is situated within the field of visual cultures, art historical and visual methodological processes including compositional interpretation, iconology, iconography and case studies are used in the analysis of the imagery; thus ensuring the analyses are positioned within the broader contexts of reality versus idealisation. Beginning with a study of femininity this thesis explores how women, as subjects, consumers and creators, have impacted upon how genders and sexualities are represented throughout Japanese artistic practices. Gender performativity as an illustrative as well as theatrical performative convention is investigated through cross-gender and cross-dressing acts within theatrical, visual arts and popular culture spheres, leading to an exploration of masculine representations. This is achieved by questioning the idealised 'male' forms in Japanese art that range from androgynous or ambiguously gendered beauties, through to hyper-masculinity. Through the interpretation of these representations it is clear that societal changes and attitudes towards gender and sexuality have impacted on the ways in which graphic arts and media represent people, despite continued aesthetic influences. However, these ideals are not necessarily reflective of the material body or sexuality being portrayed and can in fact act as an illustrative surrogate. This is evidenced in the way 'male' homoerotism is prevalent in manga created for a young female audience as, Fujimoto asserts, a means of escaping expected gender roles. This study extends these findings by evaluating the historical formulation of gendered representation through rigorous scholarship, which is then applied to visual portrayals through detailed case study analyses of ukiyo-e, illustrations, and manga. These interpretations of graphic arts consider the extent to which ideals impact on the ways in which gender and sexuality are represented in imagery. Ultimately, the performative nature of gender is vital to these analyses. Despite differences in aesthetics and attitudes, the thesis concludes that influences can be found in Japanese popular graphic arts and the portrayals of gender since the Tokugawa period.

This thesis explores shifts in Spanish cinematic expressions of the racialised (immigrant) other and considers the impact of the financial crisis (2008-2012) in these portrayals. It argues that the crisis heightened anxieties over globalisation, identity, and the standing of Spain in the world. It posits that these concerns are expressed in Spanish film with depictions of increased precarity in society, ambivalent portrayals of inclusion of the Latin American and African immigrant in Spanish society, and an articulation of power connected to international intervention and supranational collaboration. These cinematic trends contribute to redefinitions of the nation in terms of significance and Europeanness, where the previous markers of wealth and opportunity lose relevance against notions such as cooperation and conviviality. The financial crisis has incited discourses of solidarity that create points of affinity based on a shared precarious experience. The thesis engages with theoretical work on Spanish film and social sciences to reveal trends in contemporary Spanish cinema in relation to responses to the financial crisis and globalisation. It interrogates how the selected Spanish films express nation through the portrayals of its community, displays of power and influence, or notions of otherness that are challenged or encouraged through representation. A selection of fourteen films from the period 2005-2015 conforms the case studies, which illuminate changes in the depictions of the (immigrant) other and their contribution to notions of nation. While the thesis underscores trends in Spanish fiction film arising from a shift in anxieties derived from the financial crash (2008-2012), the period of study expands to 2005-2015 to better identify the transformations. This is the first study to illustrate a shift in anxieties from, on the one hand, the control of the border and Spain's readiness to accept a multicultural society to, on the other hand, concerns derived from globalisation, increasing precarity, and Spain's position in the world. The thesis contributes to scholarship on Spanish and European cinema, giving visibility to many films underrepresented in academic work. The thesis manifests that these films project ideas of nation that reassert Spain's Europeanness and its value as a global ally, construct Spain as a place of multicultural co-existence, and present globalisation as the cause of precarity.

This thesis considers the role of mixed reality in the culturally consumptive context of a contemporary outdoor sculpture park. It grounds the discussion of an augmented mode of experience by utilising a philosophical framework, derived from Henri Bergson and Francisco Varela, which distinguishes between two different senses of virtuality. The first of these is focussed on technology, whilst the second addresses issues of temporality and the specious present. These senses of virtuality are then applied to the development of a mediated mode of ocular and auditory experience, in an attempt to construct a syncretic experiential archive of subjective artistic encounters, that take place in the context of the park. Consideration of a syncretic mixed reality setting facilitates a need for a mode of design which can accommodate issues of embodiment alongside our sense of lived time. In this sense the thesis pushes against the abstracted and reduced forms of time and space that typically result from their technological representation or mediation. Precedents for understanding this mode of embodied temporal experience are seen in the works of Keiichi Matsuda, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Paul Trillo, and Tacita Dean. Underlying this technologically virtual structure is a more encompassing sense of temporality that likewise conditions our more subjective and ever-evolving durational experience. The thesis claims that our subjective sense of time is itself subject to variance via a myriad of factors affecting perception and cognition. This complex scenario is investigated via a practice-research mode of enquiry and incorporated into the simulated and speculative design outcomes that together constitute the thesis's more practical dimension. The thesis's speculative design artefacts are intended to provide a less authoritarian form of cultural commentary and contextualisation and are developed by a mode of selection and actualisation that is facilitated by Dunne and Raby's adoption of Hancock and Bezold's 'cone of futures'. As a part of its enquiry, the thesis develops a novel methodology that combines a cybernetic enquiry system with more speculative cycles of making. This methodology is intended to be positioned as one of the study's outcomes, and to be applicable in a wider context. The methodological cycles in question look to overcome the various obstacles that present themselves within the study's technically challenging scenario. This is achieved through the development and adoption of a novel search strategy which is informed by a mode of abductive reasoning. By utilising the process of abduction, a series of artefacts are produced which gradually inculcate the notion that modes of technological virtuality can affect our sense of temporal virtuality in so far as the mediation of embodied experience, via modes of augmentation, can influence, interrupt, and affect our subjective experience of lived time. Ultimately, it is intended that the study's methodology and its focus on speculatively designed outcomes, might be applied more broadly in the context of artistic research, as well as providing a layered system of enquiry that could be usefully adopted in the context of design for both the cultural and heritage industries.

This thesis examines the life and artistic career of Anne Greville (1829-1903), nee Charteris, 4th Countess of Warwick. A thorough examination of the countess's archival papers encourages us to broaden the profile of the female aesthete often presented by scholars. Anne's involvement with many of the key elements of the Aesthetic Movement extends and complicates our understanding of the appeal of Aestheticism across the highest levels of society. Furthermore, her introduction of Aestheticism into Warwick Castle, her ancient home, suggests a rethinking of the geography of the movement and its place within the English Stately Home. The research presented draws from the largely unexplored and under-appreciated Warwick Castle Archive held by the Warwickshire County Record Office. It demonstrates how the archive can be used to probe our assumptions of the type of women that were attracted to new developments in art and design during the second half of the nineteenth century. Such rare surviving documents also increases our understanding of how Aestheticism permeated into the highest levels of society and within significant ancient buildings. By examining the distinctively artistic and aesthetic pursuits of the countess, this thesis will explore the role of female aristocratic aesthetes. The first chapter places Anne within the vast context of Warwick Castle, an important historic building and home to a considerable collection of art, in which women played a significant role throughout the centuries. The second chapter investigates Anne's early experiments with interior design throughout the 1850s and 60s, and how she balanced questions of her own interests alongside taste and fashion. The third chapter probes the significance of Anne's work after the 1871 fire at Warwick Castle, with particular attention to her involvement in redesigning the castle's Great Hall and new Library. The fourth chapter explores Anne's interest in the Aesthetic Movement in relation to interiors, focusing particularly on the roles played by printed materials, photography, family and likeminded aristocratic aesthetes. The fifth chapter examines the countess's aesthetic philanthropy, showing that aristocratic women could act as provincial agents of Aestheticism within pre-existing aristocratic models and traditional institutions such as the charitable bazaar. The sixth chapter focuses on Anne's abilities as a creator of art, highlighting the embeddedness of such women within the Victorian Art World alongside its leading artists and figures. This thesis encourages a revaluation of the role aristocratic women played in the Victorian Art World, broadening and complicating our understanding of the appeal of the Aesthetic Movement in late nineteenth-century Britain.

The emergence of contemporary slow world cinemas and their formal aesthetics - the use of long shots and long takes, de-dramatisation and the attentive observation of everydayness - have been read as nostalgic evocations of European cinematic canon of realism and modernism. This Eurocentric type of reading, on the one hand, facilitates the circulation of contemporary slow world cinemas within the global film festival and cinephilic circuits; on the other hand, it also runs the risk of reducing the diverse cultural specificities displayed in a world of representations of cinematic slowness to purely formulaic and teleological universality. In response, this thesis adopts Jiaoyou (Stray Dogs, Tsai Ming-liang, 2013), Japón (Carlos Reygadas, 2002), Yi Yi (A One and a Two ..., Edward Yang, 2000) and La soledad (Solitary Fragments, Jaime Rosales, 2007) as case studies to repurpose slow world cinemas' formal aesthetics as, rather than a universalist strategy, a coincidence of hesitation that leads to a consensus of resistance against the homogenising force of globalisation and the hegemony of capitalist society and neoliberal modernity. This thesis further adopts The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn, 2019) in a coda as a standpoint, or even counterpoint, to interrogate an ethical dilemma that lies in this transformation of coincidental hesitation into consensual resistance. Besides recognising that the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and André Bazin provide productive readings of cinematic slowness, this thesis also brings into dialogue the existing scholarship on slow cinema, the de-Westernisation of film studies, Transnational Cinema and World Cinema to not only elaborate on but also reconfigure these theorists' established frameworks. Finally, this thesis demonstrates that a world of slow cinemas' resistant tendency, which addresses the detrimental impacts of modern hegemonic social mechanisms in different sociopolitical and geopolitical contexts, can facilitate the dissemination of a localised, vernacular sensibility with the aim of achieving a transnational empathy - an empathy that recognises and interconnects, rather than distills, filters and homogenises, a world of different voices.

This practice-based study explores the re-articulation of personal narratives through the crafted artefact with a focus on memory, collaboration and object relations. The research uses a craft-based approach to understand how stories of lost love are processed through making in the production of a series of crafted artefacts informed by original narratives. It questions the role of the object within memory and storytelling, how narrative can be embedded into a newly crafted artefact and considers collaboration as a tool to share experiences. It uses a new qualitative methodology 'narrative-led making' and applies oral history theory, collaborative practice and documentation, to further investigate theories of making, such as thinking-through-making, hylomorphism, haptic and tacit knowledges. In order to explore the re-articulation of narrative, stories were collected with a focus on lost love - including familial and romantic - that featured specific objects and related to the relationships. Nine participants were selected and their stories were transcribed to create narratives that dictated the choice of materials, techniques and processes to create material memories. My own practice of traditional leather working and silicone casting, and skills such as crochet, forging, and wood turning, learned through the formation of collaborative relationships with craftspeople, were selected to complete each artefact. I worked alongside participants and craftspeople whilst developing new craft production methods through which I created a series of nine new artefacts that are imbued with meaning, comparable to a preexisting memory object or material memory. Reflective interviews with participants revealed their instant attachment to the completed artefacts in which feelings of pride and happiness for their lost loves were common. Presenting the artefacts in an intimate gallery setting allowed for the wider audience to connect with the artefacts on a personal level and begin to revisit their own memories through their relation to the object. The finished artefacts resemble objects that have been lost, forgotten or are still in existence and are a part of daily life: rolling pin, brass shoes, football, medal, trainers, toilet dolly, handbag, box camera, watch. As artefacts they are imbued with the emotions of the participants' own stories. Undertaking creative research with participants (as a co-creative research process) in this way contributes to new forms of knowledge and understanding about the nature of storytelling practices in craft making.

This thesis examines the evolution of connoisseurship before and after the exhibition 'Art Treasures of the United Kingdom' (Manchester, 5 May-17 October 1857). This work reassesses how the Manchester exhibition affected both technical and critical skills, as well as the professional opportunities, of the Victorian experts of Old Master painting, print and drawing. Scholarship has not shed full light on the complex and interconnected network of critical, technical, religious, and political interactions at the base of the 1857 show. Some relevant issues, indeed, are still unexplored. For instance, scholars have generally ignored Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897)'s involvement in the 1857 exhibition, as well as the connoisseurial relevance and independence of the Manchester exhibition's 'Art Secretary', Sir George Scharf (1820-1895). This thesis, however, demonstrates that Cavalcaselle operated at Manchester as Scharf's private connoisseurial adviser. Furthermore, this work sheds light on the professional and connoisseurial competition that occurred, after the Manchester exhibition, between Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1794-1868) and Cavalcaselle. This thesis, finally, sheds light on the extent and depth of Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896)'s connoisseurship, nor on his substantial importance for the History of Art's development. The argument of this thesis, moreover, is that the absence of some Old Masters that were not displayed at Manchester show has affected, as much as the pictures that Scharf selected for the 1857 show, the connoisseurial and art-historical approach to some specific Old Masters, in particular regards the iconographic, compositional and technical interactions between the Italian and Northern European schools of the late Quattrocento. This work is based on archival research, conducted in the Marciana National Library (Venice), as well as in the National Art Library (Victoria and Albert Museum) and the Heinz Archive (National Portrait Gallery) in London, and in the John Murray Archives (Scottish National Archives) in Edinburgh.

This research project, presented in two volumes, is situated in the fields of experimental writing and fine art image making. Its overall context is the application of the imaginative faculty to factual research, showing how the two can interact creatively and productively. Affective ambiguity is defined within the project as the activation of that particular quality of uncertainty and inexactitude that causes an emotional response - surprise, delight or shock, for example - as a result of engagement with expressive written or visual material. The concept of ambiguity and in particular that of affective ambiguity is identified as an enriching element in writing and art making. Through a process of deconstructive engagement with the biographies of two Catholic saints, Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux as vehicles for these ideas, it is demonstrated that ambiguity can be a positive factor in the making and breaking of conventional narrative structures, and that greater insight and truth may be gained from a multiplicity of perspectives. Being sui generis the whole body of research follows its own lines of research methodology, having invented its own unique format for expressing the notion of ambiguity as applied to biographical material. Micro-chapters feature selected moments in the biographies of the two women, each treated differently, new possible angles expressed in a variety of voices and registers, demonstrating the variations in approach that may be deployed. Although the two women are central to the whole, the work is not primarily 'about' them. Various connections can be made that spin the work off tangentially, broadening the context, 'thickening' the description, and increasing the range of relevant references. The intention is always to highlight ambiguity of point of view and uncertainty of conclusion by focusing on previously unseen, hidden or underplayed aspects of the material. This thesis, a critical commentary on the textual and visual work and its theoretical underpinning, is submitted in support of the whole research project, practical and theoretical, along with a final exhibition of the practical work mounted at the time of the viva.

The current interpretation of Christian Boltanski's artwork understands it as a metaphor for the Holocaust. Writers who pursue this interpretation conclude that the main drivers of meaning behind his work are found in the identity of the subjects, seen as Jewish Holocaust victims, and Boltanski's own Jewish background. But these interpretations neglect to take into account that Boltanski's work openly invites a collaboration with each viewer to resuscitate forgotten childhood memories and seeks to inspire personal reflection on the lost past and existential death. Building on the main themes in Boltanski's art, this thesis asks who determines meaning in Boltanski's art and on what basis. An in-depth textual study of the existing literature surrounding Boltanski's work, close visual analysis of his and other artists' works, and the application of relevant theoretical concepts come together to contribute significant new and previously underdeveloped ideas in the discourse surrounding Boltanski's art. This thesis argues that Boltanski deliberately employs various cognitive strategies and visual devices to entice the viewer into an empathic engagement with his works. They are found in the recognisable yet ambiguous images and artefacts that represent generic, everyday, shared memories that were seemingly pulled from an unknowable yet real person in the past who is now forgotten or dead. Since the subject cannot be identified, the viewer internalises the familiar images and determines the meaning of Boltanski's work based on similar yet personal memories from his or her own past. On this basis, it is argued that Boltanski's artwork readily absorb polysemic interpretations because meaning is determined by the recuperated memories retrieved from each viewer's own background and past experiences.

This thesis analyses representations of community in amateur and professional films from selected collections from the Yorkshire Film Archive between 1910 and 1954; a time of significant social and economic change in the region. Analysis of what appears on screen is undertaken by employing modes of textual analysis and historical and critical theories, including the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and Imagined and Constructed ideas of community on a regional and national level. The thesis first considers definitions of community and problems inherent in providing a simple and single definition. Frameworks employed to develop the analysis of film footage include methodological tools based upon prior research of archival footage and thematic, textual, and historic analysis to examine what is within the foreground and the underlying representations within the footage. Each chapter then examines the changing representations of people and the environment. However, in addition to that which exists in front of the camera the study seeks to engage with those behind the camera as being equally significant. This research uses the categorisations of amateur, professional and propaganda footage to explore and interpret the film collections. However, the boundaries for these categorisations shift over time and this fluidity in definitions is considered as part of the analysis of change over time. The linear analysis of specific collections allows for comparison and contrast between key facets of community which include class, gender, and ethnicity. The analysis argues that there is no single definition of community but that communities in Yorkshire and the Northeast change between 1910-1954. The affordability and familiarity of filmmaking grew between World War One and the Post-War period and changed people's knowledge and exposure to filmmaking, reflecting dramatic economic and social changes. These alterations are represented on film, as the increase in filmmaking reveals changes to communities in public and private spheres.

This thesis explores the autonomous actions of amateurs through communal making activities, with a particular focus on quilting as a form of textile craft. As a participant observer in a longitudinal case study, I was able to be in part, assimilated into the communal voice and practice of the Meltham Quilting Bee. As a result, this research considers the actions and choices we make when we have opportunities of individual autonomy through creative practice and an understanding of how this adapts when the making of work is a shared and social experience. Patchwork has not only been used to piece together the quilts and numerous bodies of research in this study it has also acted as a concept to bring together a multitude of voices for communal and group making. Two key practices make up this thesis. Firstly, a longitudinal case study started in the early months of this work and six years later, is still running as a small quilting bee. Secondly, my personal creative practice has played a dual role as a tool to analyse and understand the nature and experience of the quilting bee but also as a marker of visual change that occurs when a professional practice listens and observes amateur making practices. This study shows that maker identities shift, the home can be reconfigured as a temporal site for making with others, voices can be consensually adapted in order that a new communal voice may emerge and in return, allows us to develop personal and empowering approaches to creativity as individuals. If there is a bingo card of low hanging fruit in the arts tree; amateur, craft, textiles, women and group making would surely be on the list and this thesis would indeed be a prize winner. However, through the lens of a feminist perspective this research firstly presents a review of literature that has created the framework through which this investigation can be understood, followed by an introduction to the methodologies that have been applied. Quilting is then contextualised in this research within both an historical and contemporary understanding and analysis in two parts, initially of the case study and then with a reflection of my own practice used, as a tool to reveal the experience of communal making. This thesis argues that the amateur is not simply someone who lacks skill or is detached from cultural engagement. When the individual becomes a part of a collective or communal amateur group, given time, they move beyond an understanding that their only option is to learn and make friends. While this is certainly an initial driving force for engagement, the amateur, through communal craft making, toys with autonomy and positively add to the great machine that is a nations culture. Organically, they develop an empowered singular voice and vision and, highlight the importance of care and companionship.

This thesis offers the first synthetic evaluation of Byzantine stucco between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. It brings together the results of disparate studies, with new material and textual evidence, to write, for the first time, a coherent narrative of the history of Byzantine stucco during the Middle and the Late Byzantine periods. This thesis demonstrates the uninterrupted use of stucco in Byzantine architecture from the Late Antique period onwards. It sheds light on the techniques used by Byzantine artisans to work stucco and examines their social and legal status in Byzantine society, providing a nuanced vision of both the skills and incomes of people in this period. A wide range of Byzantine patrons chose to decorate their buildings with stucco: from emperors to local officers and ordinary people. They used stucco to convey statements of authority or to underline their participation in networks of power. After having analysed stucco in Byzantine society, the thesis turns to wider Mediterranean stucco production, and examines differences and commonalities between Byzantine stucco and that produced in Medieval Italy and the different regions under Islamic reigns. This thesis is an initial framework. This framework is threefold: the single building, the broader context of Byzantine art, and the stucco production in the Mediterranean. The case-by-case approach used revealed how the study of stucco, in combination with the rest of the materials used in architecture, is crucial to understand the history of buildings and the communities behind them. It is the interaction between micro and macro contexts that provides the core for understanding stucco in Byzantine architecture. This interaction is also what makes stucco a diagnostic material, which provides us with a new insight into Byzantine architecture.

This practice-based thesis explores the concepts of Indigenous relational space, performance and performative Indigeneity by 'curating togetherness' towards sovereignty in Taiwan and beyond. My curatorial projects - the most significant of which are Dispossessions: Performative Encounter(s) of Taiwanese Indigenous Contemporary Art (2018) and Ngahi' Routes: When Depth Become Experiment (2019) - reveal a tendency toward two distinct curatorial strategies, which I refer to as 'Indigenous performative curation' and 'trans-Indigenous connecting spatiality.' Broadly defined, these strategies capture the particularity of Indigenous-to-Indigenous cultural exchanges and collaborations. They also constitute an approach to reclaiming counter-narratives of cultural traditions, asserting embodied sovereignty and embracing land-based philosophies realised across tribal and state borders through performative modes of curation. The thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One charts the evolution of Taiwanese Indigenous contemporary art, including its historical development since 1990 and the advance of curatorial practice since 2010, to reconstruct the background of the curatorial narratives discussed below. Chapter Two focuses on three distinctive Indigenous relational practices - Truku Nation artist Dondon·Hounwn's performance art, Rukai Nation sculptor Eleng Luluan's installation art and my own performative practice as a Bunun Nation curator working at an Indigenous public cemetery. Chapter Three demonstrates how the relational practices of Indigenous performance were activated across Performative Encounters between Sápmi and Truku in Dispossessions. It examines the performative encounter and participatory engagements among homeland, tribal/clan-based kinship and global frameworks through a discussion of Northern Sápmi (Norway) artist Marita Isobel Solberg's Chemical Chords and Truku (Taiwan) artist Dondon·Hounwn's Awakening: Original Contract, which appeared in Dispossessions. This performance art exchange, broadly defined as trans-Indigenous connecting spatiality, captures the particularity of Indigenous-to-Indigenous cultural exchanges and collaborations, but also consists of a media conglomerate representing an invocation as a multi-authored approach to reclaiming counter-narratives of cultural traditions, asserting embodied sovereignty and embracing land-based philosophies across tribal and state borders. This thesis can not only foster meaningful cross-cultural encounters and participatory, relational experience towards sovereignty but also internally transform institutions' interpretive banalities and hegemonic discourses.

This thesis examines what I call 'urban social aesthetics', which, I contend, is an 'urban Marxist' tendency in contemporary art, characterised by 1:1 scale engagement with the social urgencies of urban sites as a means for anti-capitalist agency and resistance. It is my contention that, within contemporary art scholarship, instances of this urban Marxist tendency are often not individuated from the mass of other existing urban art productions. Despite engaging with the most pressing urgencies of our contemporary moment (i.e. housing, gentrification, homelessness and contemporary forms of racial segregation), there is arguably a lack of debate that singles out and underscores this urban Marxist tendency. How can art theoreticians and scholars pinpoint this urban Marxist category of contemporary practice? How can such intellectual actors individuate this practice from the multitude of other urban art productions and approaches so that it may acquire critical, discursive independence? In this thesis, I suggest that the discourses and practices of 'Situationism' and 'experimental institutionalism' could contribute to this task. This thesis' overarching aim is to contend that the urban-centric debates and praxis of the Situationist International and experimental institutionalism could contribute to the examination of contemporary art's urban Marxist tendency ('urban social aesthetics'). The Situationist International was a predominantly European art collective that sought to resist capitalism and transform urban experience. On the other hand, experimental institutionalism is a field of curatorial practice, institutional reform and debate concerned with the art institution's potential transformation into a socially responsible agent. I argue in this thesis that said field's socially responsive approach to instituting and curating tends to engage with decidedly urban conditions. Conferring with the major hub for experimental institutionalism that is the L'Internationale museum confederation (as well as its collaborators and partners), this thesis asks-is it the urban post-Marxist theory of the Situationists that could lend to an examination of urban social aesthetics or the ongoing debates/praxis of experimental institutionality?

This research is an investigation on how movement practice embedded in the creative process from the very beginning can have a radical effect on the resulting performance. My exploration of the consequences of the use of movement as an integral part of the creative process has been conducted specifically through one major performance making project, and four other different performances that allowed me to further research and systematize a personal method of practice that I called "Traces and echoes". To contextualize my research, I conducted an historical overview of the possible sources of movement practice as part of actor training and of performance making. I complemented my investigation with the analysis of the creative processes of three contemporary theatre makers, coming from very different theatrical backgrounds, but sharing a strong physical awareness in their creative and rehearsal processes: Kellie Hughes, Lluís Homar and Andrés Corchero.

The anatomist William Hunter (1718 - 1783) was one of the most important collectors and commissioners of anatomical drawings in the eighteenth century. Surprisingly, there has not been an account of his collection of anatomical drawings, nor of his practice of commissioning images outside those pertaining to his illustrated anatomical book, Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata / The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, exhibited in figures (1774). This thesis pieces together the many facets of his wide-ranging collection, interrogating and contextualising Hunter's creation of a visual language and his display of authorship and editorship within the developing scientific discipline of anatomy in the eighteenth century. Following the introduction, which sets out the conceptual framework for this study, Hunter's collection is investigated in four chapters, a prelude and an interlude, arranged by facet of collection: historical drawings commissioned by William Smellie (1697 - 1763); anatomical drawings inherited from James Douglas (bap. 1675 - 1742); drawings and proof engravings for Hunter's own Anatomia; historical drawings by William Cowper (1666 - 1709); images commissioned for the Society of Physicians in London's Medical Observations and Inquiries journal; and Hunter's own 'paper museum' of commissioned pathological anatomical drawings. As the chapters proceed, I examine Hunter's interest in his intellectual predecessors' image-making and book production processes and the extent to which he exerted both authorial and editorial control over the process of making drawings and prints in his own professional practice. In doing so, I demonstrate how Hunter was influenced by past conventions of art and publishing and I offer a new understanding of the development of his book. Hunter's close involvement in the making of images is explained, I argue, by the early impetus of what he described as his "plan for being an author." By examining Hunter's collaborative image-making and authorial practices in parallel, this thesis demonstrates that Hunter's conception of himself as an author is key to his wider practice of collecting and commissioning images for the creation of a visual language of anatomy.

This thesis is concerned with the wounds of Christ in devotional images and texts from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. It newly examines a group of six iconographically-related manuscripts and early printed works produced in England on the theme of Christ's wounds as 'wells' of virtue. Though Passion devotion and the late medieval interest in Christ's wounds has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years, this is the first extended study of the English 'wound-as-well' iconography. This thesis first traces the origins of the wound-as-well image from the Church Fathers to late medieval vernacular spirituality, demonstrating how this motif was adapted and reimagined for a fifteenth-century English lay audience. Close descriptions of the six manuscripts and printed texts selected for analysis follow, elucidating the particularities of the wound-as-well images and their manuscript or printed context, and laying the groundwork for the final two chapters. Through text-image analysis, the processes of reading and viewing demanded by these works are explored. My examination of the layered relationships between image and text in the wound-as-well works reveals the interpretative effort required of their readers in order to activate them fully, and I offer new insights on the role that text scrolls could play on the manuscript or printed page as mediators between image and text. The final part of the thesis examines how the abstracted nature of the wounds-as-wells allows them to mediate between the bodily and spiritual senses, and thus between humans and God. These images engage the senses of the reader-viewer, particularly touch, taste, and imaginative vision, yet in their abstraction assert that they lie outside ordinary perception, and thus evade human understanding. This study of the wounds of Christ as wells advances scholarly understanding of the cult of the wounds in late medieval England, and offers new insights on the diversity of lay devotion during this period, and the role that non-narrative imagery could play in facilitating imaginative and bodily encounters with divinity.

Looking back now over the course of my PhD study, which feels like it has been a very long journey, it appears to me as a series of revolutions: that is, transformations in my way of thinking (hard now to contemplate that I have come out the other end of them) which completely changed my view, not just of my subject - the Henry Moore Studio at Dean Clough - but the art world within which I was working, and the way I wanted to write about it. When I embarked on the study in 2016, I was working as a collections curator at Leeds Art Gallery, based at the Henry Moore Institute. As the Institute is affiliated to the Henry Moore Foundation, which is the parent body of the Henry Moore Studio, I was - in theory - an insider to the project. In reality, the Studio had closed many years before I arrived on the scene, and I had never met Robert Hopper or any of the core group of people who worked there, so I came with little prior or special knowledge of the organisation. However, that is not to say that I came to the project empty-handed. Quite the opposite. As I see now (but only in retrospect), I was carrying around in my head an encompassing view of the art world, which permeated my professional practice. This did not relate to my work at the Institute or Leeds Art Gallery specifically, but a career spent working in and around institutions: from my art historical training (undertaken in a traditional university department), through several years of curatorial practice, latterly within the framework of a municipal gallery and specialist centre for the study of sculpture. Essentially, my job at the time was to categorise, evaluate and document works of art; then place them within the established canon of art history by displaying them in thematic, chronological or genre-based configurations; and, initially, I intended to explore the Henry Moore Studio in exactly this way. I wanted to define what it was, then compare it with other similar art organisations and situate it within a particular segment of art history, so that it could be better understood within my art world; and possibly used to inform future practice. It was not that I felt this method would be best particularly, but that I didn't really know any other way. From reading around the subject, I knew that the Henry Moore Studio had been a making and exhibition project, which generated a series of large-scale projects, in which the site was often a key element. Whilst the Studio had been funded by the Henry Moore Foundation, I understood that it had been run on the ground by a group of artists, based at Dean Clough, Halifax, under the leadership of Paul Bradley, who had been highly instrumental in the first project by Giuseppe Penone and subsequently managed most aspects of its programme. As a project operated by artists for other artists, under the auspices of an institution, I attempted to sketch a lineage for the Studio amongst artist-led initiatives, as they had evolved in the post-war period, specifically from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The lives of the 11th Duke of Hamilton and glass designer Daniel Pearce intersected in early 1860s London when the Duke purchased a gift for his son and heir William. The gift was the Hamilton Vase, a luxury glass vessel engraved to the design of Mr. Pearce and further personalized for the young Marquis. Still in possession of the Hamilton family today, the Vase's biography reveals it as a portal to a multitude of intertwined relationships that capture the complex artistic, cultural and societal panorama of the Victorian era. This study will begin by building portraits of the collecting life of the 11th Duke of Hamilton and the art education and entrepreneurial life of designer Daniel Pearce. To give context to the creation of the Hamilton Vase, it will continue with a thorough background of nineteenth century Britain's golden age of glassmaking. The investigation of the Vase's story is advanced by an exploration of the multiple re-uses of the Hamilton Vase design and how the evolution of the design was affected by shifting consumer tastes, nineteenth-century interest in the exotic, scientific and technological advances, and design innovations in glassmaking. When the Hamilton Vase reappears in 1919, it is withdrawn as a lot in the second and final auction of the remaining contents of Hamilton Palace, one of the nation's most magnificent country houses and art collections in British cultural history. At that moment, the history the Vase narrates is one of socio-economic change with the decline of the aristocracy and a new age of a wealthy, educated and art-minded middle class. A full exposition of glass designer and decorator Daniel Pearce's life and career will add a new perspective to the understanding of the history of nineteenth-century British glass, its designers, manufacturers, consumers and collectors. It will highlight the pivotal role played by heretofore mainly anonymous glass artists and engravers and in numerous instances will suggest attributions for previously unidentified objects in museum and private collections. This study will contribute to current object-centered scholarship by using the Hamilton Vase to reveal hidden histories and noteworthy cultural intersections during the nineteenth century in Britain, one of the most complicated periods in the History of Design and the Decorative Arts. Excavating the history of the Hamilton Vase will increase current knowledge of the complex artistic and socio-economic networks at play in Britain and will uncover the pronounced significance of Daniel Pearce's seventy-year contribution to British glass history. Too, Pearce's connection to the 11th Duke of Hamilton as the purchaser of the Hamilton Vase affords an additional perspective on the Duke's collecting history and places it in the context of his collecting contemporaries. The relationship of Pearce and the 11th Duke also is an entryway through which to examine the role of the century's international expositions of art and industry. The elucidation of Pearce's significant contributions to the history of nineteenth-century British glass will be a new and original area of research within the History of Glass. Its analysis of the extraordinary visual record provided by the Pearce pattern book in the Dudley Archives combined with new historical research will contribute to a fuller understanding of the production and consumption of Britain's world-renowned nineteenth-century engraved art glass.

The term ‘artist-led’ has become commonly used as shorthand to describe cultural forms grounded in principles of self-organisation, largely as part of the ‘second economy’ of the globalised art system. The thesis critically explores this self-organisation by visual arts practitioners in the UK following the Financial Crisis (2007), arguing that the terminology itself is defunct. It proposes the ‘artist-led condition’ as a way to re-frame those self-organised practices, enabling a social and productive benefit to practitioners through a framework of collectivisation. One that acts as a composition of individuals acting in common rather than flattening differences into a homogenous mass, supporting them to be politically active in their own circumstances. Situated within a broader discourse on self-organisation in the visual arts and cultural resistance to neoliberal hegemony in times of austerity, the research addresses key questions relating to socio-economic conditions of practice; resistance to systems of social organisation and governance; and the impact of increased internet connectivity. Outlining how artist-led self-organisation has become established as the methodology for the majority of practitioners in the period post-2007, it explores how neoliberal power structures have shaped its development, perception and function, creating a paradoxical interdependence between two sides that inherently oppose one another. Through this paradoxical relationship critique is often recuperated by that system, with a small number of practitioners able to stage meaningful critique through utilising dynamic organisational forms. When viewing practitioners as a whole the subsequent need for further dynamic forms of resistance shows the complex and modulated potential to help bring about social change artist-led self-organisation possesses. The artist-led condition specifically supports this potential, allowing for the formation of networked and localised forms of resistance to neoliberal governance in solidarity with one another. Embracing the paradox of its own existence, the artist-led condition makes public the potential it holds as a site of both problems and opportunities to potentially utilise neoliberal hegemony as a tool to support self-organised resistance to it. The research outlines the practical and ideological parameters of it to demonstrate how it can be understood and function as a catalyst for new models of self-organisation and organisational structures to be created, or existing ones to be reformatted and repurposed for continued use. Re-framing the understanding of artist-led self-organisation to provide practitioners with a new framework of practice presenting new possibilities for social change.

In 1908, the German art historian, Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965) published Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy), a book that would have far reaching consequences. He claimed that the history of art alternates between inorganic and organic forms; from ‘abstraction’ or ‘primitive’ art to Classical, humanist art. For Worringer, the crystal exemplified the inorganic, meaning that, in art history, the crystalline motif expressed a rejection of humanist art. Worringer was not the first to identify the crystal’s symbolic potential. The controversial Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) had already inspired crystalline forms amongst the Berlin avant-garde in the 1890s. Nonetheless, it was Worringer’s thesis that drove the development of the motif among the new generation of German Expressionists. In early twentieth century work, it symbolised a rejection of classical ideals while retaining a notion of transcendence. It optimistically heralded a new order with some proponents even predicting crystalline landscapes. This utopian vision faded in the Twenties and the motif was largely dormant until Robert Smithson (1938-73) revived Worringer’s interpretation in the Sixties. As an autodidact, Smithson harvested ideas from a variety of disciplines and, in doing so, he evolved the motif, placing it centre stage in several key works. Discontent with Worringer’s time-limited view, Smithson sought to encompass aeons of development. In his mature work, Smithson rejected a traditional artist’s palette, instead manipulating the physical world. Smithson’s use of the crystalline motif reaches a climax in Spiral Jetty (1970) through its interaction with the Great Salt Lake. The work of contemporary artist Josiah McElheny (b.1966) also centres on the crystalline motif, reflecting and evolving its meaning. Consequently, references to Expressionists and Smithson abound. As a skilled glassmaker, McElheny maximises glass’ material characteristics. He uses the crystalline to shatter any sense of the past as a single narrative, suggesting instead a multitude of possibilities.

This thesis analyses the Pre-Raphaelite legacy in modernism. It focuses on the works of three modernist writers and artists: W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and David Jones. The work of Yeats, Lawrence and Jones, as writers and artists, demonstrates key intersections between modernism and their Pre-Raphaelite precursors. Whilst preceding scholarship acknowledges the influence of single figures associated with Pre-Raphaelitism on individual modernist writers, I propose in this thesis that the sustained focus on the Pre-Raphaelite legacy for modernism reveals a rich intertextual connection which has not yet been fully appreciated or expected. This thesis traces biographical and critical interactions between Yeats, Lawrence and Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites, foregrounding lesser-known elements of these associations, revealing an influence which persisted throughout their lives. After establishing Yeats's connections to the Pre-Raphaelite movement at large, the first chapter examines Yeats's enduring engagement with William Morris's ideas across his poetry, drama, critical writings and radio broadcasts. The second chapter evaluates Lawrence's use of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and figures in the context of women's emancipation in his fiction and his poetry. The last chapter explores Jones's engagement with the Pre-Raphaelites through the affiliations between their aesthetic and religious views on art and their shared Arthurianism.

This thesis analyses what performance is and what it does in the court, drawing from theatrical performance. In it, I argue that performance plays a constitutive role in the court, that law and performance are intimately entwined and that law is reliant on performance for its production. In so doing, I consider whether theatre and performance studies research and practice can provide new insights into court proceedings. This is significant because whilst legal scholars draw on analogical comparisons with theatre, there is little sustained engagement with theatre and performance research and practice to inform understanding of legal performance. My original contribution to knowledge is to draw from research and practice in theatre and performance to provide new insights into legal performance in court. Central to my discussion of legal performance in court is the role of the audience, which becomes a guiding direction of the thesis and points to my interest in how the legal performance is perceived by the public gallery. My methodology combines case studies, participant observation and some performance-led research, grounded in theoretical analysis of the intersection of law and performance. Application of performance studies to the law entails a paradigmatic shift in legal research that attends to the practice and performance of law in court. Steering away from the existing work on advocacy as performance, the thesis attends to the audience's experience of the legal performance in terms of space, sound, words, rhythms and digital dimensions. The chapters are structured as something of an experiential journey through court. I first concentrate on the experience of arrival at court and journey through the liminal spaces of the courthouse. From there, I attune to the sounds and silence of the courtroom. From silence, I turn to the words in court. Still looking at the words, I then explore how these words play out in legal performance in a rhythmic manner. The final chapter examines the increasing use of video-link as a means of attending court and the digital futures of legal performance.

As there is limited research conducted on the changing cultural policy modes and the impact they have had on the emerging contemporary visual arts fields in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the goal of this thesis is to examine the emergence, development, and maturation of contemporary visual arts in Latvia as a distinct organisational and institutional field between the early 1990s and the 2010s. In doing so, this study examines the role that social and political environments and infrastructures played in shaping the institutional history of the field. The research particularly focuses on the growing influence of the non-governmental sector and the changing behaviour of state actors in the formation of cultural policy trends in Latvia in the aftermath of the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union and the effects they had on the structuration dynamics of the field. In the context of post-Soviet cultural transition of the 1990s, the term "emergence" represents a qualitative break from the relationships the actors of the new field shared with the past. In order to develop the theoretical framework for the analysis of structuration dynamics, whereby the contemporary visual arts field in Latvia came to be organised and institutionally defined throughout the 1990s and 2010s, this thesis draws on new institutionalism in organizational analysis, conceptualising that "organizations are deeply embedded in social and political environments and that organizational practices and structures are often either reflections of or responses to rules, beliefs, and conventions built into the wider environment" (Powell and Colyvas 2008, 975). The empirical analysis of this thesis is based on the sequential mixed methods research design, employing the social network analysis (SNA) as an integral research strategy during the quantitative data collection phase. In this study, the SNA is critical in expanding the understanding of the examined field and enabling the construction of a dense relational structure of the participating actors beyond the scale of the qualitative interviews, which define the first phase of the research design. Through the lens of the SNA, the field is expressed as patterns or regularities in relationships among interacting units, allowing investigating the constraining and enabling dimensions of these patterned relationships between the actors within the field. Based on SNA, in conjunction with the primary source analysis and the qualitative interviews, the empirical analysis of this thesis establishes that the development trajectory of Latvian contemporary visual arts field is divided into three distinctive historical phases, denoting innovation, local validation, and diffusion. During the innovation phase, representing the post-Soviet transition and lasting from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, the new structures and institutions in contemporary visual arts developed outside the direct influence of the Ministry of Culture, Artists' Union, and Academy of Art. Lacking systemic support and recognition from the "official" actors of the dominant state field of cultural production, the new organizations displayed a trend of autonomous development under the auspices of non-state actors. The positional configuration of the field structure, involving cultural, economic, political, social, and symbolic capitals, indicates that the structuration process, defining institutional development of the field, in its initial - innovation - phase did not occur across all levels, but was very local and professionally defined within a relatively narrow circle of artistic community. The locality where the emerging problem was generated, cognised, classified, and theorised did not represent a national level (top-down) but was peripheral and narrowly professional, denoting a bottom-up approach in institution building and the persistence of a polarised organisational reality. The local validation phase, representing the first decade of the 2000s, indicated a gradual decrease in institutional polarisation between the state and non-state actors and strongly exhibited changing behaviour of the state actors towards the field. During this phase, the emerging field, for the first time, appeared as a political category within the strategic state cultural policy planning documents and the government started playing an increasingly more important role in the constitution of the field. Latvia's accession to the European Union is analysed as the principal external factor, strongly influencing the endogenous changes within the field at the time. During the local validation phase, the field grew to be recognised as national level responsibility that was predominantly cognised, classified, and theorised in political circles, signalling the decrease in dissonance between the policy rhetoric and application, as well as between the localities where the cognition and theorisation processes took place. The diffusion phase coincided with the aftermath of the global economic crisis, which struck the country particularly hard in 2009, and this stage was characterized by increased public-private partnerships (PPP) and by emergence of strong local civil initiatives furthering the institutionalisation project of Latvian contemporary visual arts. During this final phase, the field development and the institutional framework that it represented gradually became legitimised in a wider social environment, comprising larger group of influential and active civic actors who were taking over the institutionalisation project and ensuring institutional reproduction of the field.

This submission draws together seven publications (four from the academic press and three from performance magic publications) and a covering document to set out an original contribution to knowledge in the field of bizarre magick. Bizarre magick is a sub-genre of performance magic and critical attention has been scarce in this field. The publications gathered here offer the only extended study of bizarre magick and performance that covers its inception as a form and how that form has found a place in modern mystery entertainment. This submission is informed through the author's practice as a bizarre magician. Following an initial study of the performers of Bizarre Magick, the publications included then focus mostly on detailed studies of specific aspects of the genre and its legacy; examining how bizarre magicians sought to re-enchant performance magic with the mysterious and the spiritual; discussing how practitioners of the bizarre draw heavily on fictionalised histories of science fiction, horror and the supernatural to create site-specific ritual and ceremony; and exploring the spectatorship of bizarre magick against wider issues of disenchantment in conventional magic performance practice. The three industry only works (offered an appendix) underline the author's relationship to the reflective in performance practice. The covering document sets out the core arguments that underpin the included publications, forming a cohesive approach to bizarre magick practice and its offshoots that allows us to read the genre as an integral and important performance form that has a lasting legacy in the field of performance magic. I argue that Bizarre Magick pulls at the very essence of magic practice and draws so heavily from a range of areas such as horror, the fantastic and the Gothic that it cannot be ignored as a form. In doing so, the combined research generates new possibilities for understanding and developing wider practices in performance magic and the notion of what it might mean to be a magician.

The American Civil War revolutionised visual culture. From 1861 to 1865, soldiers seized upon pictures as new forms of self-expression. Yet, engagement with war imagery presented both an opportunity and a dilemma. At the outset of the conflict, conventional modes of the pictorial representation of conflict were orientated towards a romantic image of war as a heroic cause. Such conventions remained powerful, but over the conflict's course, some soldiers began to abandon these conventions, and sought new ways of representing the experience of war; others, meanwhile, continued to fortify older traditions. As soldiers faced their foes in battle, they entered a cultural contest over the war's representation with professional picture-makers and their own comrades. "Picturing the Civil War: Visual Culture of the Rank and File" is the first comprehensive study of Civil War soldiers' wartime art. It charts how soldiers used visual culture, even as the war transformed visual technologies and as imagery transformed the public's experience of the war itself. Using new archival material from the Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Atlanta History Center, amongst others, we can see how soldiers visualised war compared to its popular representation. This thesis blends textual and visual records to elevate soldier art from products of the war, to emphatic statements about it. Putting soldier studies into conversation with visual and material culture histories illuminates how those who deemed themselves best-poised to comprehend the war experience did so in response to their lived realities. Each chapter demonstrates how different visual forms (print imagery, portrait photography, and drawn and painted pictures) inspired a clash between the ideal and the real in American war culture. They illustrate themes in Civil War history that are essential to an understanding of this contest. As modernisation characterised much of the war, it also shaped visual culture. Popular culture seized upon rapid image production whilst soldiers countered it by employing traditional forms and by focusing newer technologies on themselves. Visions of nationhood were tested, revealing that soldiers' views could be distinct from societal expectations. Death abounded and troops responded with self-representation. In these contexts, gender and identity became key to the shaping of soldiers' visual culture. As the war tested American masculinities, soldiers reformulated them in their pictures. This project reveals the nuanced nature of wartime imagery and asks: how did soldiers use visual culture to picture the realisation that idealised expectations about conflict rarely gelled with the realities of civil war?

This thesis presents a multilayered study of illustrated calendars created between the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century in Northern Italy, or presenting a Northern Italian iconography. They typically depict occupations and zodiac signs characteristic to each month of the year, and were produced in a variety of media, ranging from illuminated manuscripts and printed calendars, to paintings, frescoes and tapestries. The development of the imagery of the months is explored through three chapters arranged chronologically. Chapter 1 examines the theme of the months in the context of a luxurious manuscript book of hours; namely the Offiziolo of Charles VIII, commissioned by Ludovico il Moro from Pietro Birago between 1493 and 1494. It is proposed that the calendar of the Offiziolo echoes the interest in agriculture and astrology typical of the fifteenth-century Milanese court. It is argued that this calendar displays a political language in line with the function of the Offiziolo as a diplomatic gift. The close affinity with a printed calendar is posited for the first time. Chapter 2 investigates the iconographic impact of the vignettes of the months included in the Horae ad usum Romanum published by Bonino Bonini in Lyon, between 1499 and 1501. It has been demonstrated that Bonini's calendar greatly contributed to the standardisation of the iconography of the months in Northern Italy until around the years of the Council of Trent. The aim of this chapter is to explore both the sources and the influence of Bonini's calendar, in order to map the dissemination of motifs across time, borders and different media of production. Chapter 3 explores the changes occurred in the iconography of the months at the end of the sixteenth century, through a comparative study between the series painted on canvas by Leandro Bassano and the illustration of liturgical calendars included in the Missalia Romana, published in Venice between 1477 and 1588. It is proposed that the new iconographic pattern responded to the religious and cultural circumstances featuring the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The power of illustrated calendars to convey significant aspects of the political, cultural, economic and social context in which they were created, renders them a valuable visual document of their time, showing the importance of their study also beyond the boundaries of art history.

Forms of material cultural repression are at the forefront of modern-day cultural debates and discourse. Over the course of the past twenty years, our theoretical understanding of forms of collective memory has been thoroughly expanded. Simultaneously, the study of damnatio memoriae, the destructive acts against the portraits and inscriptions of a condemned individual in the Roman period, has benefited from the publication of the foundational works of Varner and Flower. However, these studies have thus far focussed on the immediate aftermath of the destructive acts, and the reception of the already-destroyed material. In addition, the question of how damnatio affects the Roman collective memory of the condemned remains unanswered. This thesis aims to answer this question, by examining closely two understudied aspects of the phenomenon - the immediate 'spectacle' of destruction, and its long-term consequences on a condemned individual's surviving 'material legacy'. Focussing on the case study of the city of Rome before the 'crisis of the third century', the interactions with the material legacies of condemned emperors will be examined. Each method of interaction will be analysed separately, considering all types of material from a handful of emperors in each case, to establish the way it influenced how Roman culture remembered 'tyrants'. The immediate 'spectacle' of damnatio will be discussed first, revealing how the destruction acted both to remove the positive identity of the condemned, as well as to begin the creation of a new negative identity to replace it. The long-term consequences will then be examined. Analysis of the acts of successor emperors to deliberately contrast themselves with condemned predecessors reveals how this contrast further engrained the negative identity into the cultural memory of the city. The appropriation of their buildings, furthermore, demonstrates how successors reigning long after the death of a condemned emperor continue to rejuvenate this process, contributing further to the recreation of the condemned's identity. I will argue that close scrutiny of all the consequences of damnatio memoriae reveals a process that transforms the positive identity of a condemned emperor into a negative exemplum of tyranny, embodying the negative qualities that the destruction and denigration of his material legacy condemn him for.

Laws of the Face is a multi-modal, participant-observer study of forensic cultures of human identification which pursues practical and theoretical objectives as complementary, focusing on methods of post-mortem facial depiction as forensic objects whose socio-cultural affordances have been overlooked. Recognising Forensic Art’s epistemological precarity within forensic science and ontological ambiguity as art, the cultural in/visibilities of the dead are considered through theories of faciality, photography and necropolitics, and the operational work of post-mortem forensic depictions is resituated with reference to the counter-forensic (Keenan, 2014a; Sekula, 2014), forensis (Weizman, 2014) and Humanitarian Forensic Action (Cordner and Tidball-Binz, 2017), with the work of citizen/netizen allies suggesting new ways to extend the forum of relational citizenship and forensic care (M’Charek and Casartelli, 2019). An operational study undertaken in a medico-legal facility in Cape Town (South Africa) results in an evidence-based framework which supports the routine uptake of standardised post-mortem facial imaging/depiction in complex operational contexts, informed by ways in which the so-called ‘migrant body’ is forcing change and innovation in forensic methods internationally. Fieldwork and semi-structured interviews (n=70) with forensic deathwork practitioners internationally provide a grounded analysis of the state of the field, culminating in a new critical framework for post-mortem Forensic Art as a form of ‘extra-ordinary deathwork’ (Moon, 2020), characterised by its re-mediating actions located both in the process of the work itself, and in the work these images are expected to perform, forensically and well as socially. Conventional frameworks of expert/amateur knowledge are challenged, and pracademic exchange promoted. The main tenets of the thesis are performed by an online artwork called Speaking Likeness, comprising eighteen audio-visual portraits of forensic artists in which aspects of the hidden curriculum of this work is revealed through embodied knowledge and arts-based research.

This practice-based Ph.D. examines the historic and current images of the Pendle Witches and re-envisages the portrayal of them through art practice in the light of understanding the suffering they endured. It investigates the transformation they have undergone, from being considered as potential sources of danger in the seventeenth century to becoming caricatural figures of entertainment. The study recognises that the Pendle Witches are now in danger of being consigned to history as mythologised and stereotyped people, who are often portrayed through a misleading set of tropes. It also identifies the current lack of recognition and appreciation by the public regarding the suffering these witches endured. This research uses contemporary art practice to re-envisage them by focusing on their humanity and explores the potential realities of these witches, as opposed to the way in which they are now portrayed. This investigation has explored the historical and cultural development of the visual codes used as a means of representing witches, which was initiated from the fifteenth century onwards by European artists and printers. These enduring images still remain a strong influence in the representation of all witches, including the Pendle Witches. As a way of forming a personal connection to these witches this research engaged in the experiential method of walking the 51-mile route they were enforced to take across the Lancashire landscape from the village of their interrogation to the place of their trials and executions. This walk was a stimulus in establishing a link with the witches, thereby creating empathy with the hardships they endured, both as a means of research to inform my art practice and also as a creative practice in itself. This was documented through photography and a visual diary to verify the journey and used in future exhibitions. A journal was employed as a complementary tool and a spontaneous way to reflect thought processes by documenting responses to the landscape and later allowing a personal evaluation of the journey. It was also useful to record and highlight the complexities of the walk, as a framework for the thesis and as an aide memoire by linking personal thoughts and inspirations to my artwork. The project also used interviews with contemporary witches and a local landowner as research tools for contextual information to broaden the focus of the research. These provided background knowledge to give an insight into local witchcraft practices, as well as investigating the myths which have been fabricated around the lives of local witches. The research methods have been explored to disrupt the now firmly entrenched images of the Pendle Witches and the artwork re-envisages them through the technology of laser cutting as a reference to their vulnerability. This artwork gives a currency to their recognised persecution and moves away from the sensationalism and fantasy with which they are usually associated. A commemorative trail of ash was scattered along the path during the walk as a performative expression in reclaiming the witches as individuals rather than as a mythologised people. The research contributes to knowledge by providing visual images which challenge the artistic invention and imagination of previous artists to forge a broader appreciation of the persecution of the Pendle Witches. It disrupts previous historic or contemporary portrayals and argues that re-envisaging the witches informs a better understanding in reclaiming their image for a more accurate depiction, which gives humanity to their lives. The resulting artwork has been exhibited in both solo and joint exhibitions nationally and internationally during the research, where data was collected from the public. These exhibitions have highlighted the significance of the study by demonstrating the lack of information the public have in recognising and identifying the way the Pendle Witches have been continually misrepresented.

Over the last three decades, art production has seen an international proliferation of collaborative and socially engaged artistic tendencies. By departing from the realm of aesthetics, these practices draw their material from political categories, modes of social co-existence and activism. The social reorientation of art practice problematises the distinction between the artistic and the political, presenting thus new challenges for art history and criticism. This thesis examines the historical logic and implications of this new societalisation of art and proposes a framework for its interpretation within the category of art. The origins of the “social turn” in contemporary art practice are explored in the crises of artistic production in modernity, catalysed by the transition of art economies to the regime of the market. The two historical developments in art practice I focus on are the politicisation of the early twentieth century avant-garde artwork, and the sublimation of the aesthetics of genius into a model of democratic authorship in Marcel Duchamp’s readymade practice. By advancing an interpretation of politicisation and societalisation as artistic responses to cultural-economic phenomena, the political implications of contemporary practices are posited as the new material of art discourse. Engaging with the propositions of Nicholas Bourriaud, Grant H. Kester, and Claire Bishop I explore the “social turn’s” artistic negotiations of artistic labour and materiality, artistic and social antagonism, as well as its conceptualisations of community. The politicisation of contemporary socially engaged practice is interpreted in the context of the search for artistic legitimacy which nonetheless carries significant political ramifications, as it exposes art to the heteronomy of neoliberalisation. My thesis adopts a materialist approach based on Marxist analysis of economic and political phenomena. To prevent, however, the complete absorption of artistic propositions by economic pressures, I synthesise my materialist approach with an understanding of the workings within the cultural sphere in relative autonomy, as outlined by Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu.

Beyond Words: Engaging Young Children and Families in Gallery Education at Tate Liverpool, is a three year ethnographic case study that explores what happens when preschool children, parents and nursery practitioners from a Sure Start Children’s Centre, visit Tate to participate in an extended series of gallery visits and workshops with artists. This study explores the potential value and tensions of these creative and cultural experiences, particularly for young children and families, by critically examining different perspectives, discourses and possible constructs of effective creative engagement. A theoretical bricolage is used for presenting various insights into the relationship between exploratory creative processes, children’s artistic flow, experiential learning and matters of inclusion. Bringing structuralist theories of learning together with non-representational theories, this study draws on Reggio Emilia, Deweyan and Deleuzian philosophies for thinking about children’s learning in art galleries. In doing so, it makes a case for new materialist and posthuman discourses to be considered alongside cognitive, linguistic and social constructivist pedagogies. This PhD study also contributes to debates on involving young children and families from marginalised communities in cultural visits and creative practices by opening up existing discussions on poverty and negative stereotypes. It also argues for a more creative, democratic and process driven education for young children which does not sit comfortably within current structures of formal teacher-led education, and therefore requires a messier, unbounded and rhizomatic way of thinking.

Existing Anglo-American scholarship on the films of Paul Verhoeven is overwhelmingly concerned with the director’s Hollywood productions and tends to apply frameworks of analysis based on Cartesian dualist thought. Much of this scholarship consequently finds contradictions between the politically progressive qualities of Verhoeven’s work and the reactionary politics assumed to be inherent to the popular form. This study aims to re-contextualise Verhoeven’s films as a cinema of immanence, which does not think in those dualist terms. Building on existing work that centres the body and sensation in film scholarship, and drawing on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, this thesis asks about Verhoeven’s body of work: what is a cinema of immanence, what does it do and how is it different? In this context, immanence means thinking of everything as inherent to the material world. Through close readings of Verhoeven’s films, the thesis makes the argument in three stages over three chapters. The first chapter defines what is meant by a cinema of immanence through a consideration of how bodies are presented on-screen in Verhoeven’s pre-Hollywood films. This chapter identifies a body of work that consistently decentres subjectivity in favour of a presentation of the human body as a multiplicity, also collapsing planes of the symbolic and fantasy into the world of bodies. Consequently, the film-worlds are shown to think in terms of immanent ethics, rather than a transcendent morality. Building on the definition of a cinema of immanence in Chapter One, the second chapter looks at what a cinema of immanence does by reframing the encounter between the spectator and Verhoeven’s Hollywood films in terms of immanence, affect and habit. The chapter determines that Verhoeven’s films can express the formation of rigid Hollywood frameworks of realism, genre and sexual difference, arguing that they operate as popular Hollywood genre films through camouflage or as simulacra. This opens up potential becoming-others to the spectator as habits and expectation are disrupted. The third chapter shows how Verhoeven’s films are different from films that think in terms of dualism by comparing Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987) and Total Recall (1990) with their contemporary remakes. Through this comparison, Verhoeven’s films can be seen to show a supple segmentarity and micropolitics of the individual, whereas the remakes present unified models of individuality that resonate with the interests of the nation-state and capitalism. The study concludes that the capacity to think in terms of immanence allows Verhoeven’s films to express what Deleuze and Guattari call the molecular dimension of the film world. This disrupts the function of dualist thought, which works to unify, centre, hierarchise and impose finality. Further research is recommended to shift emphasis away from scholarship that imposes dualist frameworks of analysis on the popular form, toward how a film thinks.

In the period from 1640 until 1660 England witnessed religious dispute, political dissent and military conflict which led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the foundation of a republic. This era of the English Civil War and Commonwealth and Protectorate governments has therefore come to be defined as a time of change and 'revolution' in a number of ways, including in the arts. However, there is evidence to suggest that this disruption to the status quo did not extend so deep into the established infrastructure of the 'art world' and habits of its players as has previously been asserted in art-historical assessments of the period. This thesis will interrogate the assumption that English artistic development stalled during the wars and was stifled during the Interregnum. Through select case studies, it will consider and throw fresh light on the experiences and activities of individuals from the three groups which made up the art market in this period: the artists, the art dealers, and the art patrons and collectors. In particular, this study will investigate the survival and success of the art of painting in these years, and the extent to which it prospered in London and continued to be consumed along established lines of courtly fashion and display. The evidence presented in this thesis suggests that fashionable artistic taste tended to transcend religious and political allegiances so that art patronage of the Caroline model persisted on both sides of the divide in England through the 1640s and 1650s. This continued pattern of patronage and collecting, combined with the sales of royal and courtly art collections, buoyed London's painting market so that it retained its place at the centre of the English art world.

The arts, art-making and creativity are popularly regarded as having value and importance to society and education. Yet, even at their politically most valued they have occupied a marginalised space in English schooling. This thesis is not an argument for more arts as a discipline in the school curriculum, but for art-making as a practice and site for a broader conception of education. It argues that experiencing the practice and culture of art-making provides a fertile and dynamic site for enabling learning, which can integrate different disciplines and encouraged a positive self-view in learners. The thesis draws upon a particular case study, The Imagineerium project, in which children were commissioned alongside professional artists and engineers to imagine, design and make models for a kinetic performance vehicle as part of a public event their city centre. The thesis adopts a multiple, mixed-method approach to the case study, combining traditional methods of questionnaire and interview with ethnographic field notes and participatory methods engaging all participants. Here the compound term 'art-making' refers to the practice of making work in either one or a combination of art forms. It connotes the dynamic and developmental nature of growth, creation, formation but also of construction which interweave with ideas of producing an output and effecting an outcome, here in symbolic forms. The thesis draws on: Dewey's (1934) proposal of making in the arts as central to a conception of education as a democratic, creative and self-motivated process; Ingold's (2013; 2017) emphasis on the sensed, embodied ways of knowing such experiences promote; and Lave and Wenger's (1991) account of communities of practice. I argue for The Imagineerium project, as an emergent 'community of practice' where children experience, in an apprentice-like way, being 'legitimate peripheral participants' and are engaged in art-making as members of a community of practising imagineers (artists, designers and engineers), who collaborate in making. The thesis shows the potential educational benefit of 'art-making as a site' of learning, of more closely reflecting real communities of art-making practice and of educating children collaboratively with members of such communities. Such benefits include a changed power dynamic, increasing children's sense of agency and capability as well as proposing a potentially transdisciplinary curriculum model. The thesis further argues that educators need to promote and engage in educational experiences which foreground embodied learning, which is site-specific, and hence the spatial dynamic of such education.

This thesis examines the construction of Chineseness in Britain between 1850 and 1920. It focuses on Chinese people in Britain, the image of China held by the British, and the British space most associated with Chinese presence, Chinatown in Limehouse. While much of the scholarship on Chinese in Britain often takes up eighteenth-century cultural contact and exchange, this dissertation focuses on the proliferation of exchange in the nineteenth century. Although the image of eighteenth-century China was largely associated with a feminine aesthetic perspective, it was in the nineteenth century that Britain increased its intensity of interaction with China, including trade, immigration and cultural exchange transforming British conceptions of Chinese and Chinoiserie. In particular, this thesis considers Limehouse Chinatown and the London Chinese opium dens as sites that shaped hybrid cultures, heterotopian spaces and sites for flâneurs. Drawing on visual and material culture, the thesis offers a new understanding of Chinoiserie and its impact on British views of Chineseness in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. It suggests that in addition to assessing the construction of Chineseness in Britain, an analysis of the image of Chinese people and Chinoiserie furthers our understanding of how and why fantasy and fear developed toward China and the Chinese in the nineteenth century. It calls for a re-evaluation of our understanding of nineteenth-century Sino-British relations, arguing that the impact of Chineseness and Chinoiserie on British perspectives should not be overlooked.

This thesis comprises a re-evaluation of the apotropaic Campanian Phallus: a highly familiar and desultorily implemented feature of our discipline’s conceptual toolkit, as well as an enduringly conspicuous element of popular engagement with the ancient world. The nature of the Campanian phallus’ apotropaism varies hugely from scholar to scholar and is yet to be directly interrogated or socio-historically contextualised. Furthermore, its role as an apotropaic device is regularly conflated with the Enlightenment notion of universal fertility worship, most notably articulated by the antiquarian Richard Payne Knight. This thesis’ re-examination of the ideological genealogy of phallic apotropaism in relation to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeological, anthropological and comparative-religious discourse highlights its particular import for the socio-cultural inquiries and concerns of that era. It will be demonstrated that the notion of the phallus as an apotropaic device has more in common with the nineteenth-century reinvention of Payne Knight’s ideas, and with the Enlightenment phallus’ coalescence with late nineteenth-century socio-cultural preoccupations, such as folklorism, mysticism and uncanny states of objecthood and representation. Accordingly, this thesis will expand our understanding of the place occupied by the Campanian apotropaic phallus in the modern imagination and the ways in which it relates to certain stages of our discipline’s history. Having evaluated modernity’s ideological and intellectual relationship with this fabled semiotic conundrum, the latter part of the thesis will revisit the apotropaic phallus at the ancient sites themselves. In this section, it will be shown that the phallus is rarely wholly solemn, apotropaic and symbolic nor wholly sexual, humorous and literal: indeed, its depiction in different contexts throughout the towns regularly capitalised on its capacity for double entendre, reflexive humour, social satire and semiotic ‘code-switching’. In this way, the apotropaic phallus proved a mercurial and perplexing image even for its ancient users and creators.

The thesis addresses the extent to which the normative conceptualisation of cultural policy under New Labour’s social value agenda provides an adequate framework to understand the practices and experiences of contemporary visual arts institutions in London, in the period 1997-2010. By substantiating the discursive community of contemporary art and approaching the study of governance through the lens of cultural policy and contemporary art theory, the thesis establishes that in the dominant critical position, the interpretation of governmentality that is applied to the analysis of cultural policy is largely structural. The thesis identifies a gap in the literature taking account of the perspective and role of the skilled cultural actor in governance and capturing the nuance and variety of experiences across sectors and institutions. Using three substantive case studies, the thesis sets out to provide a focused and in-depth understanding of the contemporary visual arts institution’s experience of governance under New Labour’s social value agenda. It uses a combination of research methods, including policy review, quantitative data analysis and interviews with skilled cultural actors. Findings about informal, micro-level processes, behaviours and attitudes within the institution show that the meaning of social value as a governing principle was a highly situated concept, constructed through the input of multiple discourses. The findings show that there were tensions to resolve at the interface of practice and policy that had been previously overlooked by researchers, and skilled cultural actors played an important, agentic role in decision making, meaning-making and governance. The findings further demonstrate that the experience of governance under New Labour’s social value agenda was more nuanced and varied than is visible in most normative critiques. The thesis’ findings support the use of governmentality as an analytic lens for reading cultural policy under New Labour, but with caveats. The findings demonstrate the need for cultural policy studies to understand more about the critical debates informing practice, and to pay more attention to the life of policy as it moves beyond rhetoric. The thesis’ approach shows the benefit of drawing a specific disciplinary perspective into the analytic framework.

This research sought to create one possible framework for a relationship between phenomenological experiences and visual music. Composers of visual music have long sought to create a new artform in which the visible and audible are utterly synthesised. Our different perceptions of the visual and the audible, combined with the lack of a ubiquitous, uniform synaesthesia, pose many challenges. Indeed, visual music in the 20th century, as described by William Moritz, was ‘virtually suppressed’. The modernist formalist principles that were espoused by Fischinger, Ruttmann and Richter, which are often seen as the starting point of visual music, are a result of the practitioners’ interests and the processes available at that time. This gives visual music a technical foundation, which pervades creative thinking; visual music becomes about how the sound is synchronised with the picture and conceptual links between image and sound. Traditional concepts of visual music that are predicated on responding to music were expanded to a definition that encompasses placing visuals on an equal footing to audio. This was then further expanded to a concept of visual and expanded visual music that starts from the premise of expression and aims to evoke embodied visceral affect. Affect, via the sublime, light and the human gestural, was investigated using a philosophical framework that was informed by Burke, Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Light and human traces were combined in order to affect the beholder. The approach was Practice as Research. Bringing wider artistic practices and forms of expression: animation, photography, light-based artworks and painting, into the field helped to re-frame visual music in terms of how it was perceived, created and displayed. Basing the tempo of visual music on the human gestural, ‘animation-tempo’, rather than on musical tempo was key to composing from an animator’s perspective. Taking visual music off the fixed-screen into three-dimensional installations helped to turn spectators into participants, which increased the affect of the visual music. The research culminated in the development of a framework: an open-ended tool for composition and evaluation of visual music.